Tuesday, October 23, 2007

How to Make a Fantasy Painting in 2 Days a.k.a.The Making of Blood Mountain

After looking at some of Keith's pictures from the Brushes, Needles and Burnouts show, I had to post some of his because it filled in some missing spots from my batch of pics. It also makes for a cool progression on this collabo piece we all did. Keith told me that he and one of the other tattoo guys at his shop, Marvin, jammed on a piece awhile back. Their piece looked like a lot of fun, so Keith decided that we'd pull out the paints and spray cans, and give it a shot.

The only thing Kieth and I decided on was a washy warm to cool color pattern for the background. After that was laid down, we just started pulling shapes out of the background colors. Of course, we didn't tell anyone that, we just put on the serious art face and acted like we knew what we were doing.

That's Keith's serious art face.

Making the serious art face can be harder than it looks. This is when Keith stepped away and local artist, Joel happened to walk by and decided to pitch in and put some serious detail into the dragon/skull monster wing.I, personally don't think the painting came together until Kentucky fried tattoo artist, Scott, put his personal touch on the canvas.

If you ever need that feminine touch added to your painting, in particular, the hair, you should get in contact with Keith's wife Terri. She's a master at making flat boring hair look full bodied and will paint out all the split ends for you. Not bad for her first time painting.

The painting actually didn't come together until the second night. It stood on the easel all day Sunday without anyone touching it. By the time the show was winding down, I think everyone needed to blow off some steam. By the end of the night, every artist that wasn't busy striping put their own touch on the painting, except for he who won't be named. I lost count of the number of people that contributed. At least seven or eight people jammed on this if I'm not mistaken.

So, the moral here is, if you're under the gun and have a tight deadline, just get all your friends to come over and give them brushes to help out. Just make sure if they try to paint something as ominous as Blood Mountain, to use the right kind of red.